This group is innovative not only because of its participation in this new reorganization and its subject matter but also because of its use of MLA Commons as a platform for conversation and collaboration beyond the annual convention. In the week since one of the group’s members, Cristin Ellis, first suggested that she’d “love to see this forum become a place where we can brainstorm classes and resources for teaching”—drawing attention to members’ roles as pedagogues and peers rather than just as presenters—others had posted no fewer than seven syllabi for discussion. From Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s grad seminar Ecologies of Conquest / Contact Ecologies to Karen L. Raber’s upper-level undergraduate course Animals in Literature and Stephen Siperstein’s Introduction to Climate Change Fiction, a course for nonmajors, the syllabi are a fascinating insight into a wide-ranging and timely subject.

If we asked you to define ecocriticsm in layman’s terms, what would you say?
Ecocriticism as a scholarly practice within English studies includes a vast range of topics, theories, methodologies, and historical periods. Two things pull the field together: (1) it usually addresses something having to do with the concepts of ecology, nature, the environment, or nonhuman life and (2) the scholarship is motivated by ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals, and environmental justice.

Were you using the Commons to talk ecocriticism / environmental humanities before? Did you belong to any groups that discussed the field?
Not all of us were using the Commons before the new ecocriticism and environmental humanities forum was developed. Some have been members of ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, since its beginning in the early 1990s and active on their LISTSERV for many years; others are more recent members of that organization. It has been exciting to see ASLE become a large and vibrant collective. We are grateful for the many people who have served in leadership roles for ASLE, who have done a tremendous amount to establish the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Without ASLE and the work of many, many scholars working in the field, this MLA forum would not have been possible.

When did you realize there might be enough interest in ecocriticism to start an official MLA forum?
Because of our work in the field, our affiliations with ASLE, and our work with undergraduates and graduate students, we knew interest was strong and growing. Work in this field is exciting, complicated, and important. MLA’s development of a new forum structure offered an opportunity to put together a proposal, which we were delighted to be able to do. And delighted to see approved!

Now that there is an MLA forum, what are you looking forward to doing with it?
At the 2015 MLA convention in Vancouver, we hosted a happy hour / brainstorming session that drew about seventy people. As the new executive committee walked through the crowd, we saw founders of the field of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, people who’ve been working for twenty years in these fields, talking with graduate students who attended because they were curious and wanted to get involved. Social gatherings that foster new professional connections are as crucial to our forum’s mission as are the innovative roundtables we plan to sponsor year after year. The MLA draws such a diverse group of scholars—many teaching in languages and literatures other than English—and we’re interested in bringing that diversity of fields and methods across languages and historical periods toward ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Although both ecocriticism and the environmental humanities aspire to be interdisciplinary, historical, and theoretically varied pursuits, representation of languages other than English, of periods before the nineteenth century, and of the most contemporary theoretical turns hasn’t always been strong. The MLA forum offers an excellent opportunity to build strengths and scholarly community in these heretofore underrepresented areas, complementing the work of ASLE, the ASA, and other professional organizations where ecocritical work is done.

Any particular ideas about how you’d like to use the Commons for the forum?
We are already using the Commons as an easily accessible space in which to discuss topics like what sessions to offer at the next MLA convention. Suggested by the membership and surprisingly popular so far has been the uploading of files to create an electronic shelf where we can exchange syllabi with one another. Such teaching resources are invaluable for inspiring those who have not taught ecocriticism previously to integrate environmental studies into their classroom and for challenging those of us who have been in the field for a while to think about other ways of constructing our courses. We want the Commons to be a place for conversation, collaboration, future forging, and the sharing of resources.

Any advice for emerging scholars and graduate students interested in learning more about the environmental humanities?
Graduate students and emerging scholars interested in the environmental humanities should consider crossing the divide between the sciences and the humanities, learning to engage with both academic and popular scientific accounts. With new materialism and other nonhuman turns, it has become even more important that the environmental humanities not remain within the traditional domains of the humanities proper but that it cross over and consider science, as nearly every topic pertaining to the environment has had and will have a scientific dimension. The question of how humanities scholars should engage with science remains a thorny one and thus is a potentially rich area for emerging scholars. Talk with scientists, sit in on a class, attend lectures—on the other side of your campus. We also encourage interested graduate students to spend more time on “their” side of the campus, but with scholars in other humanities disciplines—history, philosophy, art history, religious studies, and so on. While ecocriticism has been practiced primarily as literary and cultural studies, the environmental humanities asks for a more broadly interdisciplinary humanities to emerge around specific environmental crises, such as global climate change. It also assumes a public humanities outreach that may emerge through new kinds of publication, such as blogs and social media, or in interdisciplinary collaborations that result in curated events, such as performances or museum installations. We share an interest in the collaborative, multimedia, and public models of scholarship and are eager to highlight those in our forum activities.

5 Comments

perhaps the material below would be of interest to members of the ecocriticism group:

New Work in Ecocriticism. Ed. Simon C. Estok and Murali Sivaramakrishnan. Thematic Issue CLCWeb: Comparatibve Literature and Culture 16.4 (2014): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/ . The issue contains an Introduction by Simon C. Estok and Murali Sivaramakrishnan, the articles “Indigenous Taiwan as Location of Native American and Indigenous Studies” by Hsinya Huang, “Wu’s The Man with the Compound Eyes and the Worlding of Environmental Literature” by Shiuhhuah Serena Chou, “Rediscovering Local Environmentalism in Taiwan” by Peter I-min Huang, “Situating a Badiouian Anthropocene in Hagiwara’s Postnatural Poetry” by Dean A. Brink, “Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida” by Shoshannah Ganz, “The Systemic Approach, Biosemiotic Theory, and Ecocide in Australia” by Iris Ralph, “Ecological Knowledge in Community Theater” by Paul Brown, “A Survey of the Phases of Indian Ecocriticism” by Rayson K. Alex, “Ecocriticism and Persian and Greek Myths about the Origin of Fire” by Massih Zekavat, “Ecocriticism and National Image in 舌尖上的中国 (A Bite of China)” by Mingwen Xia, “The Urgency of Ecocriticism and European Scholarship” by Simon C. Estok, the book review article “Ecocriticism and Gender Studies: A Book Review Article on New Work by Azzarello and Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann” by Keitaro Morita, and “Bibliography for Work in Ecocriticism” by Zumre Gizem Yilmaz.

I am a little puzzled by the following sentence in the interview, as I found vast interdisciplinary and multicultural materials in the field when I consolidated some of my earlier work in it, some forty years ago: “Although both ecocriticism and the environmental humanities aspire to be interdisciplinary, historical, and theoretically varied pursuits, representation of languages other than English, of periods before the nineteenth century, and of the most contemporary theoretical turns hasn’t always been strong.” See following references. With best wishes, Hugh Richmond

“H. M. Richmond argues that English Renaissance poets’ ecological sensibilities can be traced to the importance of nature in their European and classical antecedents in ‘Renaissance Landscapes: English Lyrics in a European Tradition.’ (1973)”

“H. M. Richmond’s ‘Renaissance Landscapes: English Lyrics in a European Tradition’ (Mouton, 1973) speaks of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House as “the growth of a mind.” (p. 117). This important book begins to identify some of the precise links between English and Continental Renaissance traditions: its discussion of ways of approaching landscape literature has reopened the genre for modern critics I gratefully express my debt to the work. Many of Richmond’s observations on Petrarch’s and Ronsard’s influence substantiate my own arguments.” (p. 293)
Excerpt from W. H. Herendeen, “Castara’s Smiles, Sabrin’s Tears: Nature and Setting in Renaissance River Poems,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 289-305

********************

“Landscape poetry has long been considered a minor genre, and few modern minds seem to be attracted to it. To most poets and critics it appears no less unfashionable, if less deservedly so, than detailed naturalism in setting and costume does to contemporary stage-designers and playgoers. It cannot be denied, however, that for centuries poetry thrived on the description of nature, so much so that, consciously or not, the one was in the past often equated with the other. Yet the relationship of poetry to nature, or conversely of nature to poetry, is by no means a stereotyped one, and Professor Richmond’s book perceptively brings out its evolutionary spirit.

In spite of its somewhat restrictive title, this study competently deals with the whole history of rural meditation in European poetry from the early Greeks – Homer, Hesiod – to Wordsworth and even Robert Frost who, though American-born, proved a rightful continuator of the tradition. It centres on the analysis of the turning-point in the evolution of the poet’s relationship to nature (or is it, more generally, man’s relationship to his environment, in the language of modern ecologists?), as it is reflected in the works of some major Renaissance poets – Petrarch, Ronsard, Milton, Marvell – to whom the author gives special attention, while pointing out that Marot, Shakespeare, and even Drayton, contributed no less in achieving the crucial transition between landscape poetry of classical antiquity and that exemplified in Goethe and Wordsworth, and even in as recent a poet as Robert Frost.

The transition from merely descriptive to personal, autobiographical poetry, from the more or less incidental miniature landscapes found in Hesiod, Theocritus, Virgil and Catullus, to Petrarch’s and Ronsard’s full-length organic meditations in the Vaucluse or the Vendomois, was decisive in the shaping of such works as L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, or Marvell’s The Garden and Upon Appleton House, which in turn made Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey possible. The prevailing mood of this poetry is one of scientific interest and intellectual alertness, excluding total surrender. It cannot result in sterile contemplation, a temptation which only the weak and misguide succumb to. Far from providing him with a refuge from the world, this new form of rural meditation plays the role of Mother Earth to the Anteus-like poet; it gives him strength, and urges him on to return with renewed energy to broader mundane or intellectual occupations. After discussing many convincing, examples of this attitude, Professor Richmond Remarks: “The discipline of Wordsworthian landscape may thus be something less emotional and more intellectually exacting than critics steeped in the Romantic movement would have us believe . . . Marvell is also struck by the intellectual provocation to novel awareness that lies in the close study of nature. And surely this is also the note struck by Milton at the end of Il Penseroso when the speaker asserts that he would study nature “Till old experience do attain/ To something like Prophetic strain.”

The methods of Syncretic Criticism applied here prove very rewarding, and the reader is given an example of comparative literature at its best. The rich networks of connections, whether fortuitous or deliberate, which are shown to exist between so many works belonging to different ages and countries, obviously make for the conclusiveness of Professor Richmond’s argument. Such wealth of information would no doubt have justified the addition of an index of titles and proper names. . . . There is very little indeed in this book that may incur criticism, apart from some mistranslations, for which the author himself cannot always be held responsible. . . . This, however, does not really impair the quality of the book, which is pleasantly if not always carefully printed.

Extracts from a review by J. A. Fuzier, University of Montpellier, The Modern Language Review Vol. 70, No. 3 (Jul., 1975), pp. 583-585.